Stories by Lazaro Gamio

America's largest cities have 72% of the post-crisis employment growth

In the recovery from the financial crash, the largest, densest U.S. cities have had much steeper employment growth than smaller communities, according to a new study by Brookings' Clara Hendrickson, Mark Muro and William Galston.

"Big, techy metros like San Francisco, Boston, and New York with populations over 1 million have flourished, accounting for 72% of the nation’s employment growth since the financial crisis. By contrast, many of the nation’s smaller cities, small towns, and rural areas have languished."

— An excerpt from the report

The big picture: The report traces this economic trend to the current state of political polarization. "In a very real way, the 2016 election of Donald Trump represented the revenge of the places left behind in a changing economy," the authors say.

"The magnitude of the problem is unquantified. We can’t put a solid risk on it [for satellite operators]. But we all know it is only going to get worse."

— Moriba Jah, University of Texas at Austin

"There's a lot of ambiguity about what is up there and where it will be an hour from now, tomorrow or next week," says Jah, who's building a database in hopes that it will lead to "[global] rules of the road for good behavior" in space.

Two challenges: Jah says the resolution for tracking objects is currently on the order of kilometers, and "most of the things up there aren’t transmitting their information."

The bigger picture: The military's public database "account[s] for only 4% of the objects in space, according to AGI, a company which provides software to commercial and government entities to analyze and track objects," per CNBC.

Notable: 2,842 of the roughly 3,800 objects in low-Earth orbit associated with China are from Fengyun 1-C, a weather satellite launched in 1999. China used it as a target for a missile test in 2007, spewing fragments throughout space.

The details: In low-Earth orbit, the overwhelming majority of objects are pieces of satellites, rocket bodies and boosters, and other human-made objects-turned-debris. And that doesn't include bits and pieces that aretoo small to track but are still potentially damaging.

"Going forward, rules for safe, sustainable and secure space orbiting are going to be key for all operators, whether you are big or small. Orbital debris does not discriminate!"

— Saadia Pekkanen, University of Washington

What's being done to try to address the issue:

Rocket Lab, a launch company, sends the second stage of their rockets into highly elliptical orbit so it can be brought back down and burned up quickly in the atmosphere, says CEO Peter Beck.

Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium, which in 2009 lost a satellite in its constellation to a defunct Russian satellite, has called for policies that require satellites above a certain altitude to be equipped with propulsion so they can be controlled and for a retirement plan for de-orbiting satellites at the end of their run.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the most recent debris data (as of Oct. 4, 2018) and to include measures being taken by industry and government to address the issue. It was first published on April 19, 2018.